The year is 1994. I’m sitting in someone’s basement with about thirty other people. Three bands you’ve probably never heard of are playing: Brainiac, Lazy and Honeyburn. Even sixteen years later, I’ll be hard pressed to think any bands now that were better than they were then. But that’s the way music works. When it’s landing, hitting you at the right time and the right place, it’s not hard for you to figure that no experience before or since will ever be as good, or …

While there are plenty of manga about robots or dystopian futures, it doesn’t seem to me like there are many old-fashioned men in space science fiction manga available in English. The first volumes for two recent series dealing with life in space have recently been published, so today I’ll take a look at Vertical’s Twin Spica and Viz’s Saturn Apartments. I think both series would appeal to science fiction fans, but I found one charming and the other left me cold.
Twin Spica by Kou Yaginuma
Tiny thirteen year old Asumi’s greatest …

I read a lot of stuff on the Internet.
In fact, with the exception of the free daily tab I get every morning on the way to work and books, nearly everything I read is online. Along with the day-to-day news, some opinion pieces from people I like and weird stuff my friends send me through links, I read a whole bunch of sites that deal in, for lack of a better term, nerd news: coverage of stuff like video games, comics, TV shows like Doctor Who and LOST, movie and …

Online manga can be a little difficult to track down if you are trying to avoid the many sites that exist to host scanlations (fan translations), or in the most egregious cases, hosting scans of the American manga editions. Fortunately in recent months more American publishers are putting manga online for free sampling or to make it easy to subscribe for electronic access. I’ll give an overview of some of the places you can go to read manga online legally.
FREE ONLINE MANGA
Viz Media caused a stir when it started serializing …

Free Comic Book Day was started in 2002, a joint effort between comics retailers and Diamond Comics, the largest distributor of comic books and graphic novels in North America. The stated goal is to increase public awareness of the comic book industry and comic book retailers by giving away free books, specially printed by participating publishers. A secondary goal, of course, is to piggy-back on the coverage of whatever super-hero inspired film is coming out that summer for some free publicity. This year, the event takes place on Saturday, May …

Marvel Boy #4, p. 5. By Grant Morrison, J.G. Jones, Avalon Studios, Matt Milla, Richard Starkings & Wes Abbott.
Marvel Boy #4 features what is probably a more well known sequence, just a few pages after this one. Marvel Boy and Oubliette chase each other up a building in a phenomenal two pages made up of 12 Panel Grids. It’s truly fantastic, no doubt, but something about Page 5 resonates just a little bit more with me.
First of all, you’ve got the first two panels, which are just …

Fumi Yoshinaga is probably the most critically acclaimed female manga artist among the pool of creators that have had their works translated in the US. She’s won many awards in Japan for her work and has been nominated for Eisner Awards. Her series frequently end up on YALSA’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens lists. She got her start in shonen ai and yaoi manga, but her best works transcend the limitations and storytelling conventions usually found in these genres.
Today we’ll take a look at her most accessible work. There’s something …

In what will be an ongoing feature on this site, I’m going to take a rather in depth look at some of my favorite and most inspirational individual pages throughout the great pantheon of my lazily-strewn-about-my-office comics collection.

From The Punisher #13 by Rick Remender,  Tony Moore, Mike Hawthorne,  Dan Brown, and Joe Caramagna
In a medium that gets its fair share of bad raps, the latest storyline in The Punisher gets its own volatile breed of bad rapsterism from many fans.  Write Rick Remender had the audacity to kill Frank Castle, …

I don’t know much about Johnny Ryan other than a handful of his short strips passed onto me by friends with an “oh, man, look at this,” so when I got the chance to read his newest full-length story, Prison Pit: Book One, I leapt at it.
I’m glad I did, because it gave me the chance to read a story about a brutal alien protagonist dropped onto a prison planet inhabited by strange plants, hideous creatures, and a gang of inmates even more brutal and ridiculous than the lead.
We’re never …